At 19, a passion to serve in Kenya

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Jenah Kanbar seems an impossibility, a young Anaheim Hills woman whose life so far is one not even the best fiction writer could imagine.

She is 19, incredibly shy and retiring, but also a woman who has done and seen more than most of us ever will. It is only when you bring up the dead babies, the ones she loved and nurtured, does she finally lose it, burying her face in her hands to mask her sobbing.

With Kanbar, you have to go back about 10 years when she watched a documentary about Africa, of the pain, suffering, disease and hunger that exists there. It was something that would never be on the watch list of most children, but she was not like most children.

She spent much of her youth volunteering, her mother, Leeann Kanbar, told me. Was help needed in the pediatric ward of a hospital, in children's programs at the local charity? Jenah was there.

The documentary, though, got to her.

“I remember when she turned 10, I tried to buy her an Xbox,” her mother recalled. “She thought it was such a waste and began crying right there in the middle of the store. Instead of Christmas gifts, she demanded we give her money which, of course, she would promptly send to Africa.”

Jenah soon began sponsoring two young girls in Uganda, working and saving her money to send $30 every month to ensure they went to school, had food and their basic needs met. At one point before age 13, she was sponsoring 12 Ugandan children.

They would write to her, telling her repeatedly of their Christian faith. The daughter of a Muslim father and a Christian mother, Jenna practiced no religion. Those monthly letters changed all of that.

She joined Rick Warren's Saddleback Church, mostly she thinks now, because it had a large ministry outreach program. It was through Saddleback that she made her first trip to Africa at age 16, a two-week trip with 27 others in the high school ministry.

“I fell in love with Kenya and Africa, of course,” she said. “I decided I had to work hard to go back.”

She graduated from high school at 16, and had started college courses when she was in the ninth grade. Her plan was to become a pediatrician specializing in treating AIDS patients. Africa changed those plans.

She spent her 17th year working as a nanny, a babysitter – at any job she could find, saving every penny she earned. She knew her parents would not let her do what she intended until she was 18. They were parents, she said, who had so safeguarded her as a child they would not let her out even to check the mail.

By July of last year, with help from her parents, she had raised enough. She bought a ticket for Nairobi.

“I always knew I was going to go,” she says now. “All day, for as long as I could remember, I would think, ‘Africa. Africa!' I just knew I wanted to help there.”

Leeann Kanbar still grimaces when thinking of that day a year ago.

“I tried to stop her,” she said. “But she was 18 now. And she just always had this drive to help others.”

Jenah Kanbar pulled into the town of Kitale after an eight-hour bus trip from Nairobi. Her African journey would begin there.

“I know now that's where my heart was,” she said. “It just felt right to me.”

She began walking, talking to people, building relationships and trying to find places to volunteer. She went to hospitals and nursery schools.

“The hospital was horrible,” she said. “It's just filth, dirt, blood and feces, a place where operations were performed outside.”

In the children's ward, she discovered more filth and feces, along with malaria, pneumonia, tuberculosis, typhoid and AIDS in greater numbers.

“I'd help the doctors, and bring bread and yogurt to the kids. They don't feed you if you don't have money beyond one small meal the government provides of beans and maize.

“You get to know the kids,” she said. “They would get to know you. You're building this relationship. The next day, they would be dead. We would lose a lot of kids.”

Along with two men, Anthony and Emanuel, both African missionaries, she began a nursery school.

“With them I discovered what really goes on there,” she said. “Four-year-olds being raped, 8- to 9-year-olds sniffing glue, kids living in the streets as early as they could walk, them picking up feces in search of food.”

With help from her parents, she then opened a children's home and a school for abandoned, abused, neglected, sick and orphaned children. She named the small organization she was building Hosanna Children's Ministry International. More than 130 children – she started with 2 – are now enrolled in the school where she provides each of them a uniform.

It was during that first trip that she met Emily.

The young girl was living in the streets with her AIDS-infected mother. She was 4, and weighed, with her swollen belly, but 16 pounds. Emily was suffering from HIV, tuberculosis, malaria and typhoid fever.

“I never saw someone look so severe as she did,” Jenah Kanbar said.

She began helping the young girl. Her mother, sadly, was beyond help, she said. She took the girl to the doctor, who immediately set about treating her. Kanbar found a house for both of them. She fed her, and nursed her back to relative health.

At that point, Emily's mother decided to give Kanbar the child. Kanbar did not blink. With permission from the local chief, papers were signed giving her legal guardianship of Emily, who Kanbar now plans to adopt.

Jenah Kanbar hired a full-time nanny to care for Emily. She would make another trip back to Kitale before returning home this time on June 27.

She has enrolled at Orange Coast College, and works every free hour that she has. She has a school and other responsibilities that require money back in Africa. Her plan now is to become a nurse. She hasn't, she says, the 10 to 12 years it would take to become a physician,

In Africa, nurses save more lives than doctors can ever hope to save, she said.

“I'm already homesick,” Kanbar says of missing Emily and Africa.

The mere mention of, say, McDonald's, angers her. It reminds her that kids in her village walk 10 miles every day on a shaky promise of food. She refuses to go to the movies. She knows what the money for a show ticket will buy in Kitale.

“I am not going to save Africa,” she says. “My goal is to educate the next generation to be leaders so that they can change their country. I can help them, but it is going to be up to them.

“And I can't save them all. No, but every little giggle I hear, I'm going to remember it.”

It is impossible to do true justice to Kanbar's story in this space. Read it for yourself in her own words at
jenahs-journey.blogspot.com.

Bring a strong stomach along with you. And keep a box of tissues handy.

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